The man who founded a biotech that got sold to Eli Lilly for $8 billion reveals why he's staying on at the pharma giant

• Loxo Oncology CEO Josh Bilenker sold his company to pharma giant Eli Lilly in January 2019 in an $8 billion deal that came together in just 18 days.
• A year later, Bilenker is still with Lilly, serving as the company's head of oncology research under the Loxo Oncology name.
• "I think founders, if they care about the medicines they help create, should care about seeing them approved and launched," Bilenker said
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It's been a year since Loxo Oncology sold itself to Eli Lilly for $8 billion, after a whirlwind 18-day sale process.

And in an unusual turn, Loxo CEO Josh Bilenker is still with the company.

It's not uncommon for biotechs to be acquired and absorbed into the development pipelines of larger pharmaceutical companies, at which point the executive teams depart to join other endeavors.

Read more: The inside story of Eli Lilly's 18-day race to secure an $8 billion deal in time for the 'Super Bowl' of healthcare

But in the case of Loxo, Bilenker, along with Jake Van Naarden, Loxo's chief business officer and Nisha Nanda, Loxo's chief development officer, have stayed on to lead the business unit.

As of January, the organization has combined with Lilly Research Laboratories cancer research to create a company-within-a-company model. When the drugs are ready to launch, their responsibility will transfer to Anne White, who leads the oncology business unit at Lilly.

"I think founders, if they care about the medicines they help create, should care about seeing them approved and launched," Bilenker told Business Insider on the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. "There are a lot of examples in our industry where people wipe their hands the minute the deal closes."

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When that happens, he said, during the hand-off there's room for error, and a lot of the oral history around how the drug's been developed gets lost.

"That hurts the medicine," he said. "It shouldn't happen. If you're a team, you're committed to seeing that through."

Loxo was founded in 2013 by Bilenker, a former medical officer at the FDA. The company's taken the approach of developing drugs that act on cancerous genetic mutations rather than focusing on the type of cancer a person has.

The FDA approved its first drug, Vitrakvi, in 2018 not by tumor type, but rather by the genetic mutation the drug targets. Bayer has full rights to the drug, but Loxo has others in development including selpercatinib, a drug that targets mutations in the RET gene found in some non-small-cell lung cancer patients and in some thyroid cancer patients.

"It was always very clear that they were going to make sure that Selpercatinib was successful," White said. "And I was very impressed by that."

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